At 4/28/08 02:52 AM, G-Locked wrote:
At 4/26/08 02:08 AM, SirBackBoobs wrote:
Mostly accurate, one small mistake though. A theory can never become a law. A law is a simple fact, like when you throw something up, it comes down. That's the law of gravity. The theory of gravity attempts to explain why what goes up comes down, and incorporates many laws. There is no higher scientific explanation than a theory. Which is why I never really understood people who say evolution is not a science, it's a theory.
This is wholly and completely not true. Can you directly see the laws of electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces? They WERE theories, now they have been proven through experimentation and mathematical analysis as FACT, thus they have become universal physical laws. Even before a theory exists it must be supported by a lower theory or fact. Because of this, things are rarely "simple facts."
You're thinking of a hypotheses. The laws of electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces where hypotheses until they became laws.
"A scientific law, is a law-like statement that generalizes across a set of conditions. To be accorded law-like status a wide variety of these conditions should be known, i.e. the law has a well documented history of successful replication and extension to new conditions. Ideally boundary conditions, where the law fails, should also be known.
A scientific law concerns the physical world. It therefore must have empirical content and consequently be capable of testing and potentially of disproof. Analytic statements that are true or false by logic alone are not scientific laws, though may feature as part of scientific theories.
"The concept of a scientific law is closely related to the concept of a scientific theory. A scientific law attempts to describe an observation in nature while a scientific theory attempts to explain it.